November 15, 2010

A Full Course (Marketing) Meal

For those of you who weren’t aware, the head of ADwërks, Certified Advertologist® Jim Mathis, is a bit of a food connoisseur and a pretty darn good chef. In fact, he’s won awards for his various concoctions, so you know he takes it seriously.

While we recommend jumping over to his site to give the post a full read, we just wanted to highlight a few points as takeaways to keep in mind for later. As Chris explains (with his emphasis in bold),

"Now ask yourself this: when was the last time you put a spoonful of salt in your mouth? … I’d wager never… We don’t like pure flavors very much. Flavors need to intermingle, flavors need the complexities of foods that have lots of secondary and subtle interactions.

So why, in the world of marketing, do we pursue purity so much? 'We need an SEO strategy!' 'We are going to market just with social media, it’s the future!' 'We don’t advertise anywhere except pay per click!' Why do we insist on pure flavors when the customer we work with every day enjoy and demand complex meals of content, interaction, engagement, brand, and persuasion?"

At ADwërks, we subscribe to this philosophy wholeheartedly. There’s a reason we proudly offer handcrafted marketing solutions. Because we feel it takes the right mix of creativity, strategy, design, relationship-building and all of those other ingredients to make a marketing campaign memorable and, more importantly, successful.

While it might be easier to dump a bunch of salt on a plate, serve it up and expect you to be satisfied, odds are it will leave a pretty bad taste in your mouth. Same goes for agencies that simply want to utilize one single strategy. If your business is only marketing one way (print ads only, Facebook only, etc.) you could very well be missing out on a good number of potential customers. Make sure you’re cooking up a tasty, strategic marketing mix if you want to get the best results.

As Chris sums it up (again, his emphasis):

To the best of your ability, to the practical limits of your budget, serve a multi-course dinner as often as you can instead of bowls of single flavors.

Who the?

We are ADwërks.

We are advertising, media and marketing communications professionals. We are not a large advertising agency. We don’t want to be. We would much rather create handcrafted advertising and marketing communications strategies for a few very special clients than crank out a whole bunch of mediocre work for every advertiser with a pulse and checkbook.